Book Review, Fiction, Romance

This Time Next Year by Sophie Cousens ~ Book Review

Morgan

G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Genre: Romance
December 1, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

Minnie Cooper (yes, for real) and Quinn Hamilton were both born on New Year’s Day in the same hospital. The first baby born that year received a cash prize, and Quinn beat out Minnie by just a couple of minutes. The misfortune causes Minnie’s mother to decide her daughter is naturally unlucky in life, and reminds her of this at seemingly every opportunity she gets. I found this dynamic very unsettling and odd, especially since Minnie fully embraces being unlucky as part of her identity and expects it throughout her life.

When Minnie and Quinn bump into each other at a New Year’s Eve party, Minnie is shocked to find that she doesn’t hate the boy who ‘stole her luck’ as much as she might have thought. From there, the story turns into a cute but expected will-they-won’t-they that alternately brings Minnie and Quinn together and apart.

I had high expectations going into This Time Next Year that weren’t entirely met. It’s a solid romance and depictions of the two main characters lives were detailed and sucked me in. The bizarre ‘luck’ aspect of the book really threw me off and I did not find the relationship between the two characters’ mothers to be believable. If you’re looking for a cute romance though, it’s worth the read.

Buy This Time Next Year at an indie bookstore near you
This Time Next Year on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction

Cobble Hill by Cecily von Ziegesar ~ Book Review

Morgan

Atria Books
Contemporary Fiction
Release Date: November 10, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5

Cobble Hill is a quirky, character-driven exploration of the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The characters are so strange and over the top that they read like caricatures to me, which was in wonderful juxtaposition to the mundane aspects of their lives. Amongst the colorful group are Peaches, a school nurse, who really doesn’t want to be a nurse or seem to have any real training, Stuart Little, a grown man who used to be in a popular boy band, Roy, an author working tirelessly on a new novel about teenagers on Mars, and Tupper, who’s constantly on the lookout for his free-spirit artist of a wife who tends to disappear and reappear constantly.

I’m usually much more drawn into plot-driven stories than character driven ones, but this story was so over the top that I was immediately intrigued. I really liked that at first glance, the families appeared to be normal families going about their lives and raising their kids, but the more I got to know them, the more bizarre they all got. From pot-smoking parents, to kids setting playgrounds on fire, to romanticizing combing someone’s hair for lice, I really had no idea where this story was going to take me from moment to moment.

This is a light, almost whimsical read that doesn’t follow much of a storyline, but it took me on a wild ride that was enjoyable and unexpected.

Buy Cobble Hill at an indie bookstore near you
Cobble Hill on Goodreads

Uncategorized

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh ~ Book Review

Morgan

Orion
Genre: Mystery
Release Date: January 30, 2018
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

Even though I love thrillers, I always struggle with crime dramas and detective mysteries. I’d heard so many good things about Thirteen that I decided to give it a try regardless. The main character is a known murderer from the start. He is incredibly twisted as well as empowered by a strange lack of ability to feel pain. From the start, we watch him methodically follow steps to work his way onto a jury, by impersonating a man he’s killed. The stages of his plan were fascinating to watch.

Once the trial began, and the detective, Eddie Flynn started to uncover a suspected serial killer, the story got kind of dry for me. It jumped back and forth between the main character killing people in insane ways and getting away with everything, and Eddie magically coming up with realizations about the case. I found both the storyline and the writing style very repetitive.

The premise of the book, and the motive of the serial killer were interesting, but I finished this read mostly frustrated.

Buy Thirteen at an indie bookstore near you
Thirteen on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Romance

The Love Proof by Madeleine Henry ~ Book Review

Morgan

Atria Books
Genre: Romance
Release Date: February 9, 2021
My Rating: 🍪🍪

The Love Proof tells the story of Jake and Sophie’s romance. They meet at Yale and feel an instant connection, as if they’ve known each other for years. Sophie is a physics prodigy studying time, while Jake has been cultivating his economics expertise since he was young, and using it to help support his mom. I really appreciated that Henry provided background stories about each character. They gave some context to why each turned out the way they did. That being said, Jake’s relationship with his mom seemed oddly extreme and was never fully explained.

While Jake and Sophie were at Yale, I liked watching them fall in love and it was believable to understand what they loved about each other. They had very unique personalities that felt real in their quirkiness.

After they graduated, however, the story really lost me. It felt like they wasted the majority of their lives obsessing over each other. Sophie’s research didn’t really make sense to me and felt like an extension of her obsession, rather than an actual interesting scientific discovery. The further the book got from their college relationship, the more frustrated I got. There’s a difference between love and obsession and this book did not seem able to make that delineation leading to a story that was concerning rather than heartwarming. 

Buy The Love Proof at an indie bookstore near you
The Love Proof on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Someone We Know by Shari Lapena ~ Book Review

Morgan

Pamela Dorman Books
Genre: Thriller
Release Date: July 30, 2019
My Rating:🍪🍪🍪

Someone We Know follows a web of neighbors as they react to the fact that one of them, Amanda Pierce has disappeared. Her husband Richard’s narration seems calculated and cold, but it’s slowly uncovered that everyone in the surrounding houses has secrets as well.

I really liked that each household was facing distinct and believable struggles of their own. Olivia finds out that her teenage son, Raleigh, has been breaking into houses to hack people’s computers for fun, while her friend Glenda worries that her son has started drinking. The details of each family’s personal lives added a lot to the story and made me interested in learning more about each of these specific circumstances, and how they might be related to the disappearance.

This book has a police procedural element, closely sticking with the detectives investigating Amanda’s disappearance. This format tends to often feel repetitive for me, and this book was no exception. The pattern of going back to question each neighbor over and over seemed overdone by the end.

The ending of this book felt random to me. It wasn’t as much of a shock as I had hoped for, and the excessive use of infidelity felt kind of plot-devicey. I was definitely gripped by this storyline, especially helped by the short chapters and quick jumps between households, but it wasn’t a favorite thriller.

Buy Someone We Know at an indie bookstore near you
Someone We Know on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Romance, Uncategorized

The Simple Wild by K.A. Tucker ~ Book Review

Morgan

Atria Books
Romance
Release Date: August 7, 2018
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

I’ve seen countless rave reviews for The Simple Wild, so my expectations going into it were high. The story follows 26-year old Calla Fletcher, who leaves her life in Toronto to go and spend time with her father, who she last saw when she was a baby, in Alaska. Her father, Wren, is dying of lung cancer, and Calla knows this will be her last chance to form any kind of relationship with him.

Upon her arrival, Calla meets Jonah, a pilot who seems intent on making her stay miserable, and pointing out her materialistic ‘city-girl’ ways. She also meets a close friend of her dads, Agnes, and her daughter Mabel. The characters in this book were extremely well written. Tucker paints a beautiful picture of the close knit community in Bangor, Alaska, and the types of kind-hearted, rustic individuals who make it up. Each one was unique and detailed enough to feel very real. I felt like I knew them.

Jonah and Calla’s story predictable followed the hate-to-love trope. Their relationship was cute, but I wasn’t entirely blown away or convinced by it. I was more invested in Calla’s relationship with the community as a whole and with her dad. As she gets to know her dad more at the end of her life, she finds solace in forging friendships with those who were closest to him, and spends her days learning about how he’s lived her life.

Calla’s growth as a character was notable as she comes to appreciate the life her father chose in rural Alaska and the people who make the town so special. Tucker wonderfully explores the intricacies of life in Alaska, an element that added a lot to the story and elevated it from a standard romance. For me, this one was a little over-hyped, but I still liked it a lot.

Buy The Simple Wild at an indie bookstore near you
The Simple Wild on Goodreads

Uncategorized

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth ~ Book Review

Morgan

William Morrow
Genre: Horror
Release Date: October 20, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5

I hesitate to call Plain Bad Heroines horror, but I’m not quite sure what I’d classify it as– maybe some sort of gothic sub-genre. It’s a split storyline, and the two are very different. The modern storyline follows Audrey, Harper, and Merrit as they are shooting a movie at the old Brookhants School for Girls. 100 years before, it was the site of multiple mysterious deaths, two, Flo and Clara, stemming from savage yellow jackets, and tied to a then-scandalous novel by an author named Mary Maclane. The film recreates their deaths and the tragic happenings at the school at the time. The other part of the book takes place when the school is still open and the deaths are discovered. It is told by the school’s principal and those she surrounds herself with.

The juxtaposition of the two timelines was really interesting in this story, and particularly the way the movie director tried to play up the cursed nature of the setting. I was never quite sure what was really happening, and what was meant to be movie magic — and neither were the girls. The story features a lot of queer relationships during both timelines, and the relationships between the three modern girls were constantly shifting. That being said, I did not find any of the three of them particularly likeable.

I found the more modern part of this book fascinating, detailed, and incredibly unique. The part set in the 1900s was a little harder for me to follow. I think part of the problem for me was that I listened to the audiobook, and the story was over 600 pages. It would have been helpful to be able to flip back and reference past chapters (I’ve also heard the physical book has illustrations!). Overall, this was an incredibly unusual, twisty storyline with an omniscient narrator guiding the reader through the years.

Buy Plain Bad Heroines at an indie bookstore near you
Plain Bad Heroines on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison ~ Book Review

Morgan

MIRA
Genre:YA Thriller
Release Date: December 31, 2019
My Rating:🍪🍪🍪

Good Girls Lie was a truly atmospheric thriller. Set at a prep school for girls whose parents are extremely wealthy and well connected, it had whispers of Gossip Girl and the Gallagher Girls books. In general, I find this to be an extremely intriguing setting. With hazing and age-old traditions abounding, it’s hard to tell what’s normal and what’s sinister at the Goode School.

Ash Carlisle arrives from London, accepted on a scholarship after both her parents die. She’s quickly taken under the wing of the most popular upperclassmen, Becca, but the attention switches back and forth between sugar sweet and toxic faster than Ash can keep track of. Ash’s intention was to keep her head down and try to fly under the radar, but she finds herself with an increasingly large target on her back as she’s drawn to Becca. The dynamic was a little too whiplash-y for me. I understand that teenage girls can be mercurial, but in this instance it sometimes seemed too extreme.

I knew that something was up with Ash from the get-go, and I was intrigued to uncover her secrets. The writing included alternating passages with a mystery narrator who kept me guessing. I was fully immersed in this book until the actual twist was uncovered and then I was disappointed. It felt like an overdone trope to fall into, and made all the odd happenings at The Goode School suddenly less spooky and intriguing. Overall, I’d recommend this book for the prep school setting with its unconventional traditions, and the schoolgirl dynamics, but not so much as a great thriller.

Buy Good Girls Lie at an indie bookstore near you
Good Girls Lie on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Don’t Look for Me by Wendy Walker ~ Book Review

Morgan

St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Thriller
Release Date: September 15, 2020
My Rating:🍪🍪🍪.5

Don’t Look for Me follows the disappearance of Molly Clarke and the subsequent response of her family and law enforcement. The Clarke family is made of a web of strained relationships following the accidental death of Annie at nine years old. The accidental death caused by Molly hitting her with a car.

When the police find a note in Molly’s handwriting stating that she has chosen to flee and not to look for her, they don’t pursue the disappearance much more. Nicole, Molly’s daughter, however, doesn’t believe her mother would run away from her life, and despite their tense relationship, she begins a quest of her own to investigate.

The book is split into two perspectives: Nicole’s and Molly’s. I really enjoyed Nicole’s segments, and watching her trying to piece things together. The reader knows from Molly’s side that Nicole isn’t getting the full picture, and sometimes I wanted to scream at her to THINK about what she was doing, which I loved. I found Molly’s segments really bizarre and hard to get into. The plans she kept trying to make seemed incredibly far-fetched. Since this was such a big part of the book, it made it hard for me to love the story as a whole.

There was one big twist in the plot that I kind of sensed a little, but thought was really well done and built up to. The ultimate ending included another twist that I didn’t think was necessary and detracted from the story for me. Ultimately, this was a solid thriller, but not a favorite. 

Buy Don’t Look for Me at an indie bookstore near you
Don’t Look for Me on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

The Daughter by Jane Shemilt ~ Book Review

Morgan

Harper Collins
Genre: Mystery
Release Date: March 3, 2015
My Rating: 🍪.5

The Daughter is a split-narrative thriller centering on the disappearance of 15-year old Naomi, from her mother, Jenny’s, point of view. It follows Jenny in the days leading up to, and surpassing her daughter’s disappearance as well as a year later. The central concept is that she didn’t know Naomi nearly as well as she thought she did, but this is hard to fully grasp as a reader since we never get Naomi’s point of view. It would have been very helpful to see Naomi’s perspective. As written, I felt that there was no way to really guess what had happened to Naomi. I appreciate when you can look back on a thriller and see the threads that lead to the ultimate conclusion, but this narrative felt pretty aimless to me.

Jenny’s husband and two sons are frequently included in the storyline, but they never really seemed relevant until the very end, at which point it felt like too late to give them such importance. Overall, this story felt incredibly disjointed to me and the ending just seemed random. The writing itself was interesting and descriptive and there were a lot of unusual character traits and aspects of the plot that could have made for a really rich story if the narrative had been more cohesive.

Buy The Daughter at an indie bookstore near you
The Daughter on Goodreads